Identity and Genocide

University of Nebraska - Lincoln DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln Educational Psychology Papers and Publications Educational Psychology, Department of 2007 Us and Them: Identity and Genocide David Moshman University of Nebraska-Lincoln, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/edpsychpapers Part of the Educational Psychology Commons Moshman, David, "Us and Them: Identity and Genocide" (2007). Educational Psychology Papers and Publications. 87. https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/edpsychpapers/87 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Educational Psychology, Department of at DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. It has been accepted for inclusion in Educational Psychology Papers and Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln. IDENTITY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THEORY AND RESEARCH, 7(2), 115–135 Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Us and Them: Identity and Genocide David Moshman Department of Educational Psychology, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Lincoln, Nebraska, USA Genocide is commonly deemed to be either inexplicable or the result of special ha- treds. I argue instead that genocide is an extreme result of normal identity processes. Four overlapping phases are proposed. (1) Dichotomization elevates one dimension of identity over others and, within that dimension, sharply distinguishes two catego- ries: us and them. This may lead to (2) dehumanization, in which “they” come to be seen not just as different from “us” but as outside the human universe of moral obli- gation. (3) Destruction may result, accompanied and followed by processes of (4) denial that enable the perpetrators to maintain their moral self-conceptions. These phases are illustrated with examples from the Holocaust, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the Latin American dirty wars of the 1970s and 1980s, and the European conquest of the Americas. Us … … and them And after all we’re only ordinary men Me … … and you God only knows it’s not what we would choose to do —Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon, 1973 Earlier versions of this article were presented at the June 2005 meeting of the Jean Piaget Society in Vancouver, British Columbia; in an October 2005 talk at Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri; in a November 2006 talk to Nebraska Citizens for Science in Lincoln, Nebraska; and as the keynote address at the November 2006 UNL College of Education and Human Sciences Student Research Conference, also in Lincoln. I am grateful to session organizer and discussant Michael Chandler for his thoughtful comments following the presentation at the Piaget Society and to Michael Hulsizer, Clay Naff, and Margaret Latta, respectively, for organizing the three subsequent presentations. Address correspondence to David Moshman, Department of Educational Psychology, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Lincoln, NE 68588–0345. E-mail: [email protected] 116 MOSHMAN If you knew who I was and who you were, you would not have killed me. —Sign outside the Nyamata, Rwanda, Catholic Church, in which 10,000 people were killed on a single day in 1994 (Packer, 2002, p. 140). Genocides are perpetrated by individuals acting collectively on behalf of what they perceive to be their own group against what they perceive to be a different group. At the heart of any genocide, then, are individuals who see themselves in ways that enable them to act collectively on behalf of their own group against another. At the heart of any genocide, in other words, is identity. In attributing genocide to identity I do not mean to suggest that identity neces- sarily leads to genocide or that no other concepts are relevant to explaining genocide. I do suggest, however, that the concept of identity is crucial to any explanation of genocide. In this article, looking at genocide through the lens of identity, I propose that genocide can be understood as a process consisting of four overlapping phases: dichotomization, dehumanization, destruction, and denial. I address each of these in turn after some preliminary comments on genocide and identity. GENOCIDE AND IDENTITY By genocide, I mean an act or process of destruction aimed at an abstractly defined group of people. There may be many perpetrators but their actions must be suffi- ciently coordinated to constitute a singular act or process. The genocidal process may include deliberate acts of mass killing, but it may also consist, entirely or in part, of other actions undermining the biological, social, or cultural integrity of the victim group. The acts of destruction may be aimed at individuals, but the individuals are targeted on the basis of their actual or perceived association with a na- tional, ethnic, racial, religious, political, socioeconomic, or other abstractly defined group. The group must be deliberately targeted, but the process may be deemed genocidal even if the motives of the perpetrators are complex and multi- faceted, even if their perceptions of the victim group are wildly inaccurate, and even if the extent of destruction is less than total. This definition is rooted in the original conception of genocide proposed by Ra- phael Lemkin (1944) and elaborated in a 1946 Resolution of the United Nations General Assembly (Churchill, 1997; Moshman, in press). Although the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention is definitive for legal purposes, it is gener- ally seen by genocide scholars as seriously flawed (for critiques and alternatives, see Chalk & Jonassohn, 1990; Charny, 1994; Churchill, 1997; Fein, 1993; Moshman, 2001, in press; Totten, Parsons, & Hitchcock, 2002). The present analy- sis of the role of identity in genocide does not hinge on details of definition but it does assume a general conception of genocide as group destruction. IDENTITY AND GENOCIDE 117 How, then, shall we explain genocide? For the most part, I suggest, we do not want to explain it at all. What we want, especially in the most obvious and grue- some cases, is to condemn the perpetrators and remind ourselves how different “we” are from “them.” We resist even trying to understand why the perpetrators did what they did because we fear this may make it more difficult to condemn them. Such understanding may even suggest that we, under the same circumstances, would have done the same. Instead of seeking to explain, then, we take refuge in the mystification that genocide defies explanation. We condemn its perpetrators and sympathize with its victims, but assume that we can never understand it. Geno- cides, we insist, are unique evils that rend the fabric of history, black holes in the space-time of human experience from which no meaning can ever escape. Geno- cide is literally incomprehensible, we would like to believe, at least for good people like us. This reaction is psychologically understandable but scientifically unhelpful. A guiding assumption of any social science is that human behavior⎯good, bad, right, or wrong⎯can, at least to some extent, be explained. The role of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and other social sciences is to seek such explanations. Thus the scientific study of genocide must assume that genocides can and should be explained. This does not preclude labeling and condemning particular acts, events, or persons as evil, but it reminds us that neither labels nor condemnations are explanations. As scientists, it is explanations we seek. Perhaps the standard psychological explanation of genocide is that it is a crime of hate. In contrast to simply characterizing genocide as evil, to attribute it to hate is to hypothesize a cause. To see genocide as a crime of hate is to refer to a genuine and relevant psychological phenomenon. People do hate, and this undoubtedly plays a role in genocide (Sternberg, 2005). We should be wary, however, of easy suppositions that perpetrators of genocide are driven by hate. In a recent series of case studies (Moshman, 2005b), I looked for hatred in connection with the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the Nazi death camp Treblinka, disappearances in Argentina, a dirty war massacre in El Salvador, and the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee. One might think these were the right kinds of places to look, but in fact hatred turned out to be surprisingly elusive. There was less hate than I expected and strong evi- dence for a variety of alternative motivations. The complexity of genocidal motivation, however, is no reason to abandon the search for explanation. On the contrary, explanation is not only possible but has to some extent already been achieved. There is, it appears, an emerging consensus among genocide scholars that genocides and mass killings are mostly perpetrated by ordinary people playing social roles in groups, institutions, and practices to which they are politically, religiously, philosophically, ideologically, morally, pro- fessionally, economically, and/or personally committed (Arendt, 1963/1994; Ashmore, Jussim, Wilder, & Heppen, 2001; Browning, 1998, 2004; Maybury-Lewis, 2002; Moshman, 2004a, 2004b; Osiel, 2001; Sereny, 1983; 118 MOSHMAN Staub, 1989, 2001, 2003; Totten et al., 2002; Waller, 2002; Weitz, 2003; Woolf & Hulsizer, 2005). There may be a relatively small number of individuals who play disproportionate roles in the turn toward destruction (Valentino, 2004), but they act on behalf of the group. Genocide, in other words, is not so much a crime of hate as a crime of identity. By identity, I mean a conception of oneself in one’s social context that is suffi- ciently organized, explanatory, and conscious to be deemed “an explicit theory of oneself as a person” (Moshman, 2005a, p. 89; see also Moshman, 2004b). This conceptualization of identity is rooted in the neo-Eriksonian paradigm of personal identity (Moshman, 2005a), but recognizes that to see oneself as a person is to see oneself in relation to others and in relation to various groups. Correspondingly, to see oneself in relation to a variety of people and groups is to see oneself as an indi- vidual with a unique pattern of social relationships, affiliations, roles, and commit- ments.

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